Environment: Inspiring Stories

Chico Mendes

Francisco “Chico” Alves Mendes Filho was born in Brazil’s Western Amazon rainforest in to a family of rubber tappers (people who collect rubber from trees in the forest). As he grew up, he saw the devastation wrought on the rainforest by cattle ranchers and loggers who cut down trees to turn the forest into pastureland. In 1975, Mendes founded a union movement to stop ranchers from destroying the land where rubber tappers had lived for dozens of generations. His work helped bring attention the importance the rainforest to the world. Some 20 percent of the oxygen in the world is created by Amazon trees. By destroying the forest, the ranchers were literally suffocating the planet. In 1988, Mendes headed an effort to stop cattle rancher Darly Alves from deforesting an area that tappers hoped to transform into a reserve. The effort succeeded. In retaliation, on December 22, 1988, one of Alves’s children shot and killed Mendes. Mendes became an emblem of the fight to preserve the Amazon. In his honor, the land and forest where he lived is now a preserve do you mean “reserve”?

William Kamkwamba

William Kamkwamba, a Malawian teenager was forced to quit school because his family did not have enough money to pay his school fees. William continued to learn on his own through his local library. William loved science and while reading one day, he came across a windmill in a book. He was fascinated by what the windmill had the power to do: create electricity and pump water. Once he saw this, he was determined to bring running water and electricity to his Malawian village. Many people thought he was crazy for his idea, but William persisted and built a 16 foot tall windmill tower out of rubbish and was able to produce 12 watts of power: enough to pump water into his family’s mud house. He upgraded his 12 watt windmill to 48 volts soon after, and then built another windmill to help irrigate his family’s farmland. William also installed a solar-powered mechanical pump which helped to bring a source of water to the areas surrounding his village. He vows to continue to bring power and running water to his village and to Malawi. He has spoken about his accomplishments in conferences around the world, and his story inspired the book, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind.

George Schaller

George Schaller may be the greatest field biologist of all time. At only 26, he trekked into the jungles of Central Africa to study mountain gorillas. Instead of watching from afar, Schaller lived among the gorillas. No one had done anything like it before. Schaller went on to study the giant pandas of China, the jaguars of Brazil and the blue sheep of Tibet. Each time, he returned from their habitats with intimate portraits of these little-understood animals. Through his work Schaller has convinced governments around the world to protect wildlife. His handiwork can be found in the creation of over 20 preserves, including the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska and Chang Tang Nature Reserve in Tibet. At 77, he’s now working to create a peace park on the borders of Afghanistan, Tajikistan and China to preserve the habitat of Marco Polo sheep, a majestic animal with arc-shaped horns.

Lonnie Thompson

As a renowned climatologist, Thompson famously braved frozen climbs to collect ice cores from frozen glaciers in over 15 countries. Ice cores are an important marker in measuring the progress of the world’s climate. The core acts like a timeline. As glaciers grow, they trap air from the atmosphere in the layers of ice. Each layer tells of the different temperatures and gases in the air at the time it froze. A scientist like Thompson need only drill a long tube of ice out of a glacier to read the Earth’s climate history. At Thompson’s freezer at Ohio State University, he has stored samples of ice from 700,000 years. In 1978, he climbed up Peru’s Quelccaya glacier and discovered that the glacier, and many like it around the world, was shrinking because of the warming planet.

Corneille Ewango

When Ewango was a child, he helped his family poach animals in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Okapi Faunal Reserve. He killed elephants for their tusks and monkeys for their meat. But he soon rejected the illegal poaching of animals when he discovered the value of ecology. Ewango joined the staff of the Congolese Institute for the Conservation of Nature and soon became responsible for helping protect the same animals he once poached. Along with elephants and monkeys, the reserve is the only habitat for okapi, a mammal that resembles a cross between a zebra and a giraffe. During the Congolese civil war in 1996-2002, most of Ewango’s colleagues fled. Soon militias arrived to poach the animals. Ewango rallied a group of 1,500 residents to protect the reserve during the chaos. He was one of the few who stood up to the militias and And thanks in part to his work, the reserve was saved.

Wangari Maathai

The first woman in East Africa to earn a doctorate, Maathai began a women’s environmental organization in Kenya called the Green Belt Movement. Over the years, Maathai inspired its members to plant more than 20 million trees in farms, schools and churches across the country. The movement soon grew into a force that empowered woman to stand against poverty and the repressive regime in Kenya. In 2004, she won the Nobel Peace prize for her “contribution to sustainable development, democracy and peace.” She was the first female from Africa to win the prestigious prize.